Perhaps you will recall a story that Boccaccio puts in the mouth of Melchizedek the Jew. Melchizedek tells the sultan the tale of an exceedingly wealthy old man, whose family passes to its most favored son of each generation a ring of great antiquity. When the time comes for this old man to write his will, he is unable to choose between his three equally virtuous sons, and instead hires a skilled jeweler to fashion two copies of the ring. So exact are these replicas that after the old man’s death, no one, not even the jeweler, can tell which is the original. So it is, Melchizedek declares, with the Christians, the Muhammadans, the Jews. How is one to resolve this puzzle? If the three rings are truly identical, is it blasphemous to wonder whether this should be a concern for mortal men? Whether it matters at all?
Tongue-tied like a schoolboy, Crivano stares at the insignia carved into the senator’s desk, unable to think of any response but one: the old man is dead. He opts to keep his silence.
The senator places the rock-crystal in a sunbeam, rotating it on its point. Colored rays sweep the desk like spokes of an invisible wheel. On its smooth sides Crivano can make out the iridescent whorls of Contarini’s fingerprints.
This afternoon, Contarini says, you met my young cousin.
Perina. Yes.
She had questions for you.
Yes. She did.
Contarini draws a deep breath and lets it out. For the first time today, he looks old. I had asked Perina, he says, to be delicate and respectful, in a manner befitting a young lady of her station. But I fear that her youth in this house suffered a lack of womanly paragons for such behavior, and thus her tread is often heavier than it should be. For this you have my apologies.
No apology is needed, Senator. I enjoyed speaking with—
Contarini quiets him with a raised palm. Please, he says. Grant an old diplomat a few frank words to ease his guilty conscience. Perina sought to interrogate you about the Battle of Lepanto, for reasons you have perhaps by now ascertained. I indulged her, not only by arranging today’s encounter, but also by withholding from you my knowledge of her intentions. I allowed you to be ambushed. I had imagined this to be a thing of small consequence—an amusing stratagem to disrupt your usual reserve, to encourage you to speak freely of your past deeds—but I see now that I was presumptuous.
He lays his heavy crystal down, angling a thin rainbow smear across the desktop, over the white surface of an unfinished epistle. On it, Crivano can make out a careful sketch of the Piazza, an inverted salutation written in French. The sun is dropping over the canal, lengthening Contarini’s shadow. The cast spectrum has already begun to fade.
I never went to war, Contarini says. Like many of my fellow senators, I came of age during a peaceful era in our Republic’s history. I and my colleagues should be grateful for this. Instead, we are envious. We see these younger men, our sons and our cousins, who tasted firsthand the victory at Lepanto, who can always respond to our pretense of aged wisdom by saying: But I was there! And we sigh, and we dream of the fame we might have won if only Fortune had smiled upon us as she did upon them. In short, we imagine war to be a crucible for forging glory. It is not. It is a waste and a horror—the product of the worst failures of velvety statesmen like myself—and to envy any man a brush with it is an impious folly.
Senator, Crivano says, you prosecute this suit against yourself with too much zeal. Were there no glories to be found in wars, they would have ceased long ago.
Oh, glories can indeed be found in them. And where they are lacking, there they can be placed. The installation of glory after the fact is a trade, like any other. If you have seen the new paintings in the doge’s palace—miserable Francesco himself supplied one—then you know that I have participated in this unlovely business. Simply the price of governance, as the Florentine clerk said: the maintenance of the imago urbis. But as I sat in that dark room today, listening to Signore della Porta’s absurd encomium, I realized how noxious his words must seem to one who has seen battle with his own eyes, and not through a glass, darkly. Great God, that poem! Is it not startling, the way we still laud the old blind doge after all these centuries? A crusader who made war on Christians, whose ghost has all but escorted the infidel to our gates? But our poets and our painters cut him from the tapestry of his times, they push him ever forward through our history, until he comes to signify nothing but the valor of the Republic. Thus is he emptied: a perfect surface to reflect our greatness back to us. This will happen with Bragadin, too, in time. And with Lepanto. Perhaps it is already happening.
In Bologna, Crivano says, I heard those two names fall often from thoughtless lips. But in this city they seem subjects wreathed always with silence, best not raised at all. I confess that this has been a source of confusion for me.
The senator nods. I had hoped that the city would welcome you more warmly, Vettor, he says. That they would be more overt in their expressions of gratitude. But it was difficult for me to arrange even the few paltry gestures you have seen.